Tuesday, October 06, 2009

I’m too young to have seen Philip Marlowe when it was originally broadcast, and I’ve never been able to watch it since. (So far, there’s been no DVD release of the show.) Nonetheless, I have long been aware of this 1959-1960 ABC-TV series, which placed New Jersey-born actor Philip Carey in the role of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles private eye. It debuted 50 years ago today, on October 6, 1959, with an episode titled “The Ugly Duckling.”

ran for 26 episodes from 1959-60 on ABC, and [there were] no memorable stories about it to make it stand out. Philip Carey, a big, tough and usually watchable actor, would seem to have been a decent choice to play Marlowe in 1959. Carey’s Marlowe differed from the books in at least two (and probably more) ways in that he sported a scar on one cheek and apparently had a marina apartment and his own boat. The latter two changes prompted Time magazine, in an article on the glut of TV detectives at the time, to question if Carey’s Marlowe might be on the take from some “wrongos.” ... The line producer and frequent scripter was Gene Wang, a radio/television veteran who was also the first story editor on thePerry Masontelevision series. Frank MacShane’s biography of Chandler indicates that E. Jack Neuman, a top-drawer radio-television writer who later developed such long-running series as Dr. Kildare and Joseph Wambaugh’sPolice Story, may have written for the series. Other writers included Charles Beaumont, best known for his work on The Twilight Zone, and James E. Moser, creator of Ben Casey and Medic. Obviously, some good talent behind the camera, but the show didn’t distinguish itself ...

Other than Marlowe, the only recurring character in the series seems to have been an L.A. police lieutenant named Manny Harris, played by William Schallert (later of The Patty Duke Show and The Nancy Drew Mysteries). The program’s jazzy theme music was composed by Richard Markowitz, who also created the more famous theme for The Wild Wild West. And if this series “didn’t distinguish itself” among private-eye dramas in the late 1950s/early ’60s, it was at least popular enough to inspire the creation of a board game (shown at left).

Raymond Chandler actually died six months before Philip Marlowe debuted, so he never saw even one of the series’ half-hour, black-and-white installments. However, in Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (2000), author Gene D. Phillips recalls that “Chandler had for a long time shied away from authorizing a Marlowe television series, explaining, ‘To me, television is just one more facet of the considerable segment of our civilization which never had any standard but the soft buck.’ He referred to television producers as ‘lunatics’” and said, “I simply can’t afford to have the character [of Marlowe] murdered by a bunch of yucks.” Yet, when Goodson and Todman “approached him about a Marlowe series in late 1958, Chandler felt that he had held out long enough and finally relented. After all, the emolument he would regularly receive for the use of his character was too substantial to pass up.” Phillips goes on to quote Carey’s recollections of his encounters with Chandler:

Carey remembered that Chandler wanted the series set in the 1940s, the time frame of all of the Marlowe feature films that had been produced up to that time. But the producers countered that the Marlowe movies were set in the 1940s because they were made in the 1940s and held out for a contemporary setting for the series. Chandler was subsequently vindicated when the series was later criticized by television critics for not sticking to the forties time frame of the Marlowe films.

Before the series was premiered, Carey had a conference with Chandler, during which Chandler “asked me what I thought of some of the people who played Marlowe in films. ... He wasn’t very coherent, but he liked the way I looked.” Chandler agreed to help promote the series by appearing on some television talk shows with Carey; these rare appearances by the reclusive Chandler testified to his overall willingness to help the series succeed. Carey looked back on Chandler in the last year of the novelist’s life as “rather crusty, and not a very nice man to be around”--a comment often made by those who crossed Chandler’s path in Hollywood through the years. As with the radio series, Chandler did not wish to supervise the television scripts; “but as long as he felt some involvement,” he was content, Carey concluded. Chandler was no doubt pleased that each segment included a statement in the opening credits that the series was “created by Raymond Chandler.”

Philip Marlowe’s cancellation in the spring of 1960 turned out not to be the worst thing for actor Carey’s career. He went on to guest parts in 77 Sunset Strip, Ironside, McMillan & Wife, Banacek, McCloud, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He broke ground in an episode of All in the Family, playing an ex-pro football player who admits to Archie Bunker (Carol O’Connor) that he’s gay. Carey spent two years starring in the NBC western series Laredo, and put in more than two decades on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, playing Texan patriarch and self-made billionaire Asa Buchanan.

Carey died in February of this year at age 83. By that time, Philip Marlowe probably merited just a minor mention on his résumé. Yet, other than Powers Boothe’s 1983-1986 series, Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, Carey’s show represents television’s sole long-term attempt at translating the dark but vivid world of Chandler’s P.I. to the small screen. A commendable effort worth noting today, half a century after Carey first trod those mean streets in Marlowe’s shoes.

Just the Facts

All Points Bulletin

Send Us News:
The Rap Sheet is always on the lookout for information about new and soon-forthcoming books, special author projects, and distinctive crime-fiction-related Web sites. Shoot us an e-mail note here.

The Rap Sheet Network

Subscribe to The Rap Sheet

If You Can, Please Help The Rap Sheet to Survive and Thrive

Winter Reading Picks

See our list of more than 325 crime and thriller novels due out on both sides of the Atlantic between now and April Fool’s Day. Click here.

Your Vigilance Is Welcome

Those of us responsible for The Rap Sheet try to get everything right, and we work to keep our Web links up to date. But we’re not perfect. So, if you spot any errors (typographical or otherwise) in this blog, or discover links or embedded videos that aren’t functioning properly, please let us know via e-mail.

The Rap Sheet Faithful

Disclosure Notice

The Rap Sheet accepts books sent free of charge from publishers, publicists, and authors. Those works may inspire comments on this page. However, in no case is there any promise given that a book will be the subject of an endorsement or review, either positive or negative.

True Crime

NBC Mystery Movie at 40

Back in the fall of 1971, NBC-TV introduced its most successful “wheel series,” The NBC Mystery Movie. Look for our anniversary posts here.

Videos Disclaimer

From time to time, The Rap Sheet features short video clips. Use of these is for historical and entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to establish ownership of such materials. Rights to those clips stay with their owners/creators.

The One Book Project

In honor of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday, we invited more than 100 crime writers, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Their choices can be found here.

The Wayback Machine

Before The Rap Sheet was a blog, it was a monthly newsletter in January Magazine. To find all the old editions of that newsletter, just click here.

Buy Books Online

QUOTABLE CRIME

“We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.” — American detective novelist Ross Macdonald